I crossed the street by myself in downtown Manila during rush hour. I froze right before the center island when a Jeepney got a little too close. After my heart started again I looked at the driver and he was laughing his ass off. This dumb American didn't know how to cross streets.
Driving down the main road from my village to the nearest supermarket and as I was coming around a corner my rear tire clipped a puddle that was in the shadow of a tree and my car started to spin, somehow I managed to recover after fishtailing down the road for about 50 metres but it was terrifying. If I had been slower to react or if I’d hit the brakes at any point I would’ve ended up either in a fence or in someone’s barn.
Took over 400 sedative type pills in under 40 minutes, tried to o.d. homeless shelter staff found my unconscious body covered in puke the next morning. From an hour after taking pills to 18 hours later... complete black, like I wasn't here. Coming back to this reality was slow, painful, surreal. Nurses afterward said I nearly died, or did die and they brought me back.
An experience unlike any other.
I was in 3 car accidents over the course of three years, all of which the car I was in was totaled.
The worst of the three was one of those secondary, peak rush-hour accidents. I was on a two lane freeway (two lanes one direction, two lanes the other with a cement divider in the middle) around rush-hour with a pretty heavy amount of traffic but moving fast. I was going between 60 and 70 and in a really good mood. I’d just spent the whole day making music with one of my best friends with crazy vintage equipment and I was on my way to play a show that night. I was daydreaming and looked away from the road for a second, looked back and saw break lights. So I tapped my breaks, but then in a split second I realized those break lights were coming super fast. I did the exact wrong thing and slammed on my breaks. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I was hit from both the front and the back. I was driving a tiny two seater from the early 90s, not exactly the safest car. I felt around myself and I seems to be all in one piece. No pain anywhere. Iwas able to squeeze my way up out of the car, bewildered. I didn’t seem to have any injuries at all. The car looked like a crushed tin can. I went to the hospital just in case and it’s a good thing I did because as the shock wore off I discovered I had a bruised rib that was making it very hard to breathe. But that was my only injury. They gave me painkillers and sent me on my way.
I spent the next year in a fog of painkillers and existential despair and confusion. To this day I have trouble driving and I frequently question whether I’m actually alive or living out a dream in the dying seconds of my mind.
Help me out, with impact imminent, why is breaking hard the wrong thing to do? I get that it gives the car behind you just as little reaction time which might cause a chain reaction, but the end result appears to be the same to me?
About 25 years ago, my car was struck by another, in the rain, with very poor visibility, on a two-lane highway, going around a curve. I came to and discovered that my car was on its roof, and I had gotten out of it while dazed. I was about 3 feet away from traffic that was passing by, facing the highway, and had almost walked out into traffic.
I was going 45 mph on a main road, when an 18 year old trying to show off for his girlfriend, blew threw a stop sign on a residential road and t-boned me going 80 mph. I was one of the luckier victims, with emergency surgery, fractures and breaks everywhere, loss of use of two fingers, and nerve damage in all of my limbs.
The driver's girlfriend did not survive, and my coworker, who was in the car with me, had every rib shatter and his spine broken. 3 years later, he's still on oxy (he had to get special approval and prove that it wasn't addiction).
I don't remember the crash itself, but I remember a fire and waking up to my coworker covered in blood, screaming and delirious. I remember falling in and out of conciousness while I was moved from room to room to get emergency care for the next 3 days. Most of all, I remember the relief at hearing my coworker's voice after 4 days, now knowing that he was still alive.
I once while hiking in the desert I fell off a sandstone monolith and landed in a bush that broke my fall. If Id missed the bush I'd have hit rocks and died, ants would have eaten my corpse.
When I was a kid I put a yellow cherry pit up my nose while my family and I were on a bus. I remember trying to dig it out, but pushing it deeper every time I did until I started sneezing uncontrollably. By this point I was crying, but it was so far up that nobody could see it and thought I was lying. The bus driver stopped doing his route and took us to the nearest hospital. They were able to find it and 3 nurses held me down while the doctor stuck some medical pliers up my nose to pull it out. After wards the doctor said that had it been 1 centimeter deeper I would have asphyxiated to death and yelled at my parents for letting me have small object.
My entire arm shattered through a glass window and cut me down to my bones. Took like 30-something stitches for both cuts, including 3 internal stitches for one of my arteries. I am incredibly lucky to be alive.
One time, my blood sugar was 26 mg/dl. Can confirm, felt close to death, surprisingly conscious.
To make a very long story (as it is a long, but boring story) short, my health had deteriorated due to a health condition of mine. I waited almost too long to go to the ER (which the "why" is a long rant that I'll save for another day). I'd lost about 70 pounds in the span of maybe two or three(?) months, and was just skin and bones. Ended up needing surgery to repair some major damage that had occurred, and was in the hospital for a month due to all of it.
When I was originally admitted from the ER to the hospital, the doctor had told me that if I had waited any longer I probably would've been dead as the damage would've not been reversible.
I'm certainly no stranger to my condition causing my health to decline a lot, but that was definitely the first (and thankfully only) time that it had gotten that close to killing me.
Tried to crash my car into a bridge stanchion, chickened out, tore the mirror off.
I hit by knee really hard on a tree when I went snowboarding I had to wait an hour to have my brother come carry me to his car. If I didn't have my phone with me I could have frozen to death
That time that a teen with an M16 with safety off, loaded and set to full auto turned around and aimed it at me (and a few others) because he needed help (Would love to shit on US gun laws but this was not in the US)
I’ve had a surprisingly similar experience, in the army, although it was a Diemaco C7. I was following behind one of my conscripts on a live fire walking/pop-up target trail, as a safety officer, and near the end of the trail, the dumbass turns around, finger on trigger, full-auto and starts chatting with the rifle pointed straight at me.
I very calmly asked him to lower his rifle to the ground, then unload it, then tore him a new one. Then I went and sat down for a bit.
I have died 3 times. I was a very premature birth and spent my first year in nicu. My mother told me I had died 3 time and been brought back. I had independent verification from my aunt but no documentation for proof.
I have not seen myself closed enough until now. Just think that could be anytime and anywhere but nothing has really frightened me.
For everyone who thinks they were never that close it was probably while driving or crossing the street. It just takes one distracted driver and you're passing thousands of them.
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